professional headshot

Tess Rinearson

I'm Tess Rinearson. Most recently, I worked at the Interchain Foundation, where as VP of Engineering I led teams building open-source infrastructure for many leading blockchain networks, including Cosmos. Among other things, these teams were responsible for Tendermint Core, a popular proof-of-stake consensus engine, and the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol, a leading interoperability standard. I remain on the Foundation Council, which is equivalent to being a director—but Swiss🇨🇭—for the Interchain Foundation.

Additionally, I serve on the board of the Mina Foundation, which is building the world's lightest blockchain protocol; and I take joy in teaching people about the technical fundamentals behind blockchains. I’ve given technical presentations for groups ranging from high school girls to central bankers!

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I studied computer science at the University of Pennsylvania and Carnegie Mellon University, but I dropped out to join the early team at Medium as a software engineer.

I’ve been working in the blockchain space since early 2015, when I started working at Chain.com as a software engineer. At Chain, I worked on our database infrastructure and blockchain protocols, before eventually becoming an engineering manager and then the VP of Engineering.

In 2018, Chain was acquired by Interstellar, where I continued as VP of Engineering until I joined the Cosmos ecosystem in 2019.

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I now live in Berlin, where I like riding my bike around the city and inflicting my broken German on innocent bystanders. I also angel-invest and advise startups (especially those doing novel things with distributed systems or cryptography).

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My recent (ish) talks and podcast appearances include:

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Here are some other places you can find me: